The next hedged paddock, that at a crossing of lanes, held a horse so like Kanwy that Tristen at first thought that was the horse he was seeing—a huge black fellow with abundant feather over vast feet. The horse
,!
looked up, and there were no eyes, just a nose under a huge fall of hair, with ears coming through it. He had to laugh.
“He wants clipping,” the man said, having slid down beside them. “His name is Dys ... Dysarys, but we call him Dys. His Majesty’s Kanwy is his full brother, and their sister, Aryny, she’s staying up in the hills: His Majesty don’t risk her, no, Lord Warden. I’ll hail up his trainer.”
The old man led the pony down a side lane on that errand. Tristen put out his hand, and Dys came over to smell his fingers and look him over from the secrecy of his fall of bangs.
“Gods, he’s fine,” Uwen said reverently. “Pretty, pretty lad.”
He knew Uwen most wanted to see what they had for him. He reached out his hand further, and Dys went off with a flip of a thick tail, kicking up immense heels.
The trainer came walking up from the paddock next, a middle-aged man who introduced himself faintly as, “Aswys, m’lord. I come with ’im, and hopin’ to stay with ’im a while, courtesy of His Majesty. I’m trainer to Dys, here, and to Cassam, next over, who’s to be your man’s horse.”
“I would be very pleased, sir,” Tristen said. “Thank you.” The horse had come over again, clearly accustomed to the trainer, who patted the huge neck that extended across the rail at this gate-end of the paddock.
He did not think, regarding taking Aswys along with the horses, that he needed doubt Aswys’ skilclass="underline" Cefwyn would not have a man who was not competent, and he saw nothing in the way the man looked at the horse that told him otherwise.
“He’s hard mouthed,” Aswys said, “if ye have a hard hand, m’lord, but if ye go a little easy, he’ll heed ye far better.” The trainer was worried, Tristen heard that, and saw it on his face. “Should I saddle him up, m’lord, by your leave?”
The trainer wished him to ride and not wait until later. The trainer hoped he would like the horse and appreciate him. The man was, if anything, very proud and fond of this horse that he could never own, and Cefwyn had given Dys away to a lord with no land and—Sulriggan had said it yesterday—no good reputation.
“Do, please,” he said, and the trainer looked at least moderately encouraged, and ordered the boys to fit Dys up with his tack while he showed them the other horse in his charge.
That pen held a blue roan gelding that Cefwyn had bestowed on Uwen, a bow-nosed fellow with a beautiful satin coat; Cassam was, their guide and now trainer said, also of the King’s stable, not related to Kanwy or Aryny, but out of a Marisal mare and a Guelen stallion.
“Can we have ’im under saddle, too, sir?” Uwen asked hopefully, and while they arranged that, Tristen went back to the other paddock, where at that very moment the thump of large feet hitting the mud beyond the hedge told him Dys was not accepting saddling quietly.
As he came back in view, Dys was snuffing the air, then came across the pen at a run, appearing to move slowly, by the very size of him, but carrying himself lightly all the same.
And the boys went over the fence.
Then the trainer came back and whistled at him, ducked through the fence and whistled again. Dys came trotting up and let himself be caught.
The trainer buckled a chain to his halter, jerked it as Dys snapped peevishly at the boys that brought the tack through the fence, not intending to strike them, Tristen marked that as he leaned on the top rail. Dys did not like strangers in his paddock; and Dys was a fretful horse even while the saddling went on in the hands of a man he trusted. Dys observed everything about every movement around him, and wanted to keep all strangers including the one at the fence where he could see them: his skin shivered up his forelegs, his nostrils were wide, and even from where Tristen was standing he could see that Dys had begun to sweat.
And the trainer had known it when he sent the boys in—arranging to show m’lord what a young and stubborn lord might not heed in the way of warnings.
This lord heeded. The trainer called him over. Tristen ducked through the fence, keeping clearly in Dys’ sight, and Dys, snorting and snuffling as he walked up, lowered his head and stretched out his neck to smell him over. Dys was interested in his fingers and his coat as they brought up the mounting block.
He did not believe the calm for a moment. “Give me the brush,” he said, and took it from the trainer and went over Dys’ shoulder and neck and patted him. He ran his hands over Dys’ legs and, trustful at least of the mail shirt he had on under his coat, let Dys smell his back and around his face.
Then he quietly took the reins and with a quick use of the block, rose into the saddle.
Dys moved out a few paces and turned a quiet circle, wanting more rein, maneuvering to have his way. And did not get it.
It was different than riding Gery’s light, quick motions. But a Name almost came to him, a Name, not a Word; and as they picked up speed around the enclosure, Dys answered his call for this lead and that, shaking his neck when the pressure went off the reins. The boys opened the paddock gate and they went off down the lane between the pens, the boys and a stray, yapping dog chasing after.
Trees passed in a screen on either hand. They went as far as the sheep meadow beyond, and he asked turns of the horse, while the foolish dog, outdistancing the boys, nearly came to grief: Dys kicked out unasked, clipped the hound, and turned, and the dog after that kept his distance as Dys made long passes and turns across the meadow.
Then Tristen gave him a free run, which happened to be to the west,
toward Ynefel, and the thought came simply to run and run and run, and somehow to escape, and to take Dys, too, where he need not do what all his existence aimed at doing—to be safe, and free, and doing no harm.
He began to like this horse—but not what his training had made him; and what they both were created to do.
But they reached the end of the meadow, and a fence; and when he rode back again, Uwen was out with the roan gelding.
Dys accepted his stablemate quite reasonably. There was a little to-do, a little fighting the rein; but they rode out together for some little distance, and Dys began taking the rein very well, changing leads with ease, making nothing of rough ground, quite willing to have the roan behind him or beside him on either hand.
They were out for long enough for the horses to work up a good sweat, and, mindful that the horses had been moved in yesterday, and on the road for days, they rode back again, the horses breathing easily, shaking themselves and seeming to have enjoyed the turn outside.
The trainer did not doubt either of them now, Tristen thought, when he turned Dys back to him at the paddock gate. And one of the boys said, not intending to be overheard, Tristen was sure, that the Sihhé were known to bewitch horses, and he had bewitched that one.
After that, for, in anticipation of dealing with horses and mud, neither of them had worn their best, they took a hand in the unsaddling and the brushing-down, to the amazement of the boys who usually did such things for lords and their men.
But by then Aswys was talking to them both, going on at length about how Dys had been foaled late in the season and how Cass, for so they called the blue roan, had been one of those horses into everything—had gotten himself up to his neck in a bog when he was a yearling and fallen in a storm-swollen stream the next year: “Keep ’im away from water,” was Aswys’ advice on Cass. “He’ll drown, but he’s too stubborn to die.”
Tristen liked Aswys. Aswys had gone from guarded, worried, and unhappy to a man, as Uwen put it, they’d drink with: a Guelen man, moreover, Uwen said. Not that the Amefin lads hadn’t the knack with the horses, but, Uwen said, Guelenfolk and the heavy horses talked a special language.